Evangeline Lilly Talks About Her Badass (S)Elf In Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit

There And Back Again

Most people know Evangeline Lilly from her time spent on a (mostly) deserted island on ABC’s Lost, but the actress will soon be known from her work on another island – New Zealand! She plays the elf Tauriel in Peter Jackson’s next two installments of The Hobbit trilogy and recently got to talking about the character.

We got our first look at the newly created character thanks to some action figure packaging (we believe the image above is her stunt double, it was just too great not to use) but there was still a lot we didn’t know about Tauriel. What we do know, thanks to Lilly, is the new elf is definitely a warrior. Head of the Elven guard to be exact.

“She’s a very, very young elf,” Lilly told us. “She’s only 600 years old, unlike Legolas who’s like, 1,900 years old and Thranduil who’s about 3,000 years old. She doesn’t have quite the wisdom and pose that those two boys do; she’s a little more… gritty. A little more spontaneous, passionate perhaps.”

Taking her bow in The Desolation Of Smaug, Tauriel is a fighter who makes a mess with finesse. “To play this character I need to have a certain amount of grace,” said Lilly. “But I’m also supposed to be an absolutely ruthless, deadly killer.”

While some Tolkien purists may be upset over a new character being added to the mix I, for one, am excited we’re getting a fierce female character. Something Tokien’s works lacked and something Lilly previously addressed, “The Hobbit didn’t include female characters at all and was a very linear story, a book for children, really. What Peter, Fran (Walsh) and Philippa (Boyens) have done is all in perfect keeping with Tolkien’s world, while adding a third dimension to an otherwise very two-dimensional story.”